Description:
Web security is at the top of customers' minds after many well-publicized personal data breaches, but the people who actually build Web applications aren't paying much attention to security, experts say.

"They're totally ignoring it," says IT consultant Joel Snyder. "When you go to your Web site design team, what you're looking for is people who are creative and able to build these interesting Web sites... That's No. 1, and No. 9 on the list would be that it's a secure Web site."

The biggest problem is designers aren't building walls within Web applications to partition and validate data moving between parts of the system, he says.

Security is usually something that's considered after a site is built rather than before it is designed, agrees Khalid Kark, senior analyst at Forrester.

"I'd say the majority of Web sites are hackable," Kark says. "The crux of the problem is security isn't thought of at the time of creating the application."